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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Israel, Palestine, and Democracy. By Eugene Kontorovich. Commentary, December 17, 2013.Kontorovich:Democracy
and demography have become the main arguments for creating a Jew-free Arab
state in Judea and Samaria. Israel’s presence in the territories deprives
Palestinians of their democratic rights, the argument goes, and if Israel does
not give the Palestinians whatever territory they demand, it will have to
choose between its democracy and its Jewishness.

The
“democracy” argument has become the central justification of the diplomatic
process, incessantly invoked by Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli peace
envoy Tzipi Livni. What makes the democracy argument effective is that it plays
on deep-seated Jewish sentiments. Israelis are a fundamentally liberal,
democratic people who desperately do not wish to be put in the role of
overlords.

The
problem with the democracy argument is that it is entirely disconnected from
reality. Israel does not rule the Palestinians. The status quo in no way
impeaches Israel’s democratic identity.

It is
true that the Palestinians are not represented in the Knesset. But Israeli
residents of Judea and Samaria are similarly not represented in the Palestinian
Legislative Council. Simply put, both the Palestinians and Israelis vote for
the legislature that regulates them. That is democracy (though obviously it
does not play out as well in the Palestinian political system).

The
Palestinians have developed an independent, self-regulating government that
controls their lives as well as their foreign policy. Indeed, they have
accumulated all the trappings of independence and have recently been recognized
as an independent state by the United Nations. They have diplomatic relations with
almost as many nations as Israel does. They have their own security forces,
central bank, top-level Internet domain name, and a foreign policy entirely
uncontrolled by Israel.

The
Palestinians govern themselves. To anticipate the inevitable comparison, this
is not an Israeli-puppet “Bantustan.” From their educational curriculum to
their television content to their terrorist pensions, they implement their own
policies by their own lights without any subservience to Israel. They pass
their own legislation, such as the measure prohibiting real estate transactions
with Jews on pain of death. If Israel truly “ruled over” the Palestinians, all
these features of their lives would be quite different. Indeed, the Bantustans
never won international recognition because they were puppets. “The State of
Palestine” just got a nod from the General Assembly because it is not.

Whether
the Palestinian self-government amounts to sovereignty is irrelevant and
distinct from the question of whether Israel is denying them democracy. Indeed,
Israel’s democratic credentials are far stronger than America’s, or
Britain’s–the mother of Parliaments. Puerto Rico and other U.S. controlled
“territories” do not participate in national elections (and this despite Puerto
Rico’s vote last year to end its anomalous status). Nor do British possessions
like Gibraltar and the Falklands. These areas have considerable self-rule, but
all less than the Palestinians, in that their internal legislation can
ultimately be cancelled by Washington or London. The Palestinians are the
ultimate masters of their political future–it is they who choose Fatah or
Hamas.

To be
sure, Israeli security forces operate in the territories under Palestinian
administration. But that has nothing to do with democracy; it is about
security. Democracy does not give one political entity a right to harm others.
And that is why American security forces conduct raids–assassinations, even–in
countries around the world. While many object to America’s aggressive policies
in these countries no one thinks it has anything to do with the democratic
credentials of one side or another. Similarly, the Palestinian military
operates throughout Israel–through rocket and missile strikes from Eilat to
Ashdod. Yet no one suggests Palestinian military activities in Israel–which
determine when there will be school in Beersheva and when not–mean that they
have deprived Israel of democracy.

This is
no longer a dispute about democracy; it is a dispute about territory. The
Palestinians have their own government; now their demand is to increase the
geographic scope of their legislative powers to “Area C,” where 100 percent of
the Jewish settlers live, some 400,000 people, and only 50-75,000 Arabs. The
Palestinians want their “no Jew” law to apply there as well.

Palestinian
self-determination is one of the biggest developments that no one has noticed.
It is important to recall where it came from. It was a result of the Oslo
process, and the withdrawal from Gaza. This created space for truly independent
Palestinian government to arise.

This
has not been costless for Israel. It subjected Israel to an unprecedented
campaign of terror–to its citizens incinerated in buses and cafes–coordinated
by the Palestinian government during the Oslo war. It legitimized the
Palestinians as full-fledged international leaders, vastly facilitating their
diplomatic campaign against Israel. And it has made most of the territories a
Jew-free zone.

Before
Oslo it could truly have been said that Israel ruled the Palestinians. But that
is over. However, that the “international community” still considers Israel as
running the show for the Palestinians is an important warning that the
reputational benefits for the Jewish state of peace agreements are fleeting and
illusory.

Moreover,
the Palestinians rejected full independence and statehood on three separate
occasions in the past twenty years. If it is true that Israel still controls
them, it is a control that they have chosen to perpetuate. As part of their
strategy of winning by losing, they perpetuate their semi-independence to
maximize their diplomatic leverage. But that is not Israeli domination; that is
Palestinian tactics. Imagine if Israel in 1948 refused to declare independence
until all its territorial claims were satisfied and all Arabs expelled, and was
subsequently overrun by the Arab states. Imagine if Jewish leaders stuck to
this position for decades. Would the Arabs be imposing their rule on the Jews,
or would the Jews be imposing the Arab rule on themselves? That such a scenario
is more than far-fetched only underlines the historic uniqueness of the
Palestinian strategy.

Ironically,
those who invoke the democracy argument are also those who say Israel must go
along with the plans the U.S., Europe, and the “family of nations” have for it.
But can Israel be a democracy if its borders, security, and the fate of its
most holy places are determined by the opinions of foreign powers, against the
inclinations of its elected government? Jeffrey Goldberg last week said Israel’s
democratic status is threatened if it does not listen to the dictates of John
Kerry, who was not even elected to lead America.

Ultimately,
the democracy argument proves too much. If Israel truly must give the
Palestinians an offer they will accept to “save its soul,” then the
Palestinians can demand anything, and should get it, assuming even a
micro-state or protectorate is better than an evil one. And this is why the
democracy argument will impede a genuine negotiated resolution. If Israel needs
Palestinian agreement to save itself, why should the Palestinians agree? If
they can impose “non-democracy” on Israel, the longer they wait, the better
deal they get.

The
American Studies Association, a group of nearly 5,000 professors of the
subject, has voted by a large margin to boycott all Israeli institutions of
higher education, the New York Times reports. The path of the Boycott, Divest
and Sanctions movement (BDS) is not exactly paved with significant victories,
but the ASA, which apparently prides itself on its deep understanding of
academic freedom andthe details of
international law, is very confident of its resolution’s importance:

“The
resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their
academic freedom, and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including
Palestinians,” the American Studies Association said in a statement released
Monday.

The
statement cited “Israel’s violations of international law and U.N. resolutions;
the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and
students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a
party to state policies that violate human rights,” and other factors.

Interestingly,
in a more-Catholic-than-the-Pope development, the ASA’s position on Israel is
well to the left of that of the Palestinian Authority. The guild of scholars so
sensitive and attuned to the goings-on in Palestinian life apparently missed
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s desperate entreaty to BDS
groups to stop boycotting Israel. The
Times of Israel reported Friday:

“No, we
do not support the boycott of Israel,” the Palestinian leader told a group of
South African reporters on Monday. “But we ask everyone to boycott the products
of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is
illegal. […]

“But we
do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself,” he reiterated. “We have relations
with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.”

Perhaps
we should next expect these brilliant scholar-activists to boycott the PA for
its despicable collusion with the Zionist Entity.

The ASA
is hardly an organization whose pronouncements shake the earth, and its boycott
resolution probably won’t join the Balfour Declaration and PLO Charter in the
Arab-Israeli conflict’s pantheon of defining documents. But because it typifies
a certain type of empty intellectual posturing on a complicated issue and
because both supporters and opponents of the BDS movement engage in some
over-the-top rhetoric about resolutions of this type, it is worth thinking
about the support base for the kind of anti-Israel resolution that so many
academics longing to feel cutting-edge about something seem to be drawn toward.

Before
doing that, I ought to make my own position on this clear. I have long believed
in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and see the State of
Israel as the embodiment of that right. I believe that the Palestinians have an
equal right to self-determination and that the Palestinian state needs to have
sustainable frontiers and, on the West Bank, territorial contiguity. Further,
I’ve argued in print and in electronic media that the key reason that so many
negotiations over the two state solution have failed is that Americans in
particular have not paid enough attention to what Palestinians need to gain to
make such a solution viable. I have been on record for about thirty years in
print saying that I don’t think that settlements are a good idea and have said
so more than once to Israeli officials. I think that the cease fire boundaries
that existed until 1967 do not constitute viable permanent boundaries for
either people and that a final agreement on territory would include mutually
agreed on swaps and adjustments. I participate in academic exchanges and
activities with both Israeli and Palestinian institutions.

Speaking
personally, I don’t boycott. I’ve met with representatives from both Hamas and
Fatah over the years in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Beirut. I’ve also met
with Israelis on all points of the political spectrum there, including radical
settlers in and around Hebron. Globally, as a journalist and a scholar, I’ve
met with all kinds of people whose viewpoints I find objectionable. I’ve had
dinner with Fidel Castro, I’ve interviewed neo-Nazi skinhead thugs in the
former GDR, I’ve visited North Korea and met with officials of that regime.
(I’ve never broken US law on these trips, by the way.) I did stay out of South
Africa until the first majority elections had been held, but would have met
with officials or scholars representing the old regime had there been some
reason to do so, as I have met with scholars from Iran and with officials of
Hezbollah. I am on the board of the New America Foundation, an organization
that has come under criticism when one of its senior fellows invited the
controversial author of a book very critical of Israel to speak. I neither
resigned from that board nor criticized the event. When Brandeis University
recently canceled its cooperation agreement with Al-Quds, a Palestinian
university where students held a demonstration in support of the terrorist
organization Islamic Jihad, I supported the decision of Bard College, where I
teach, to continue our relationship based on the facts as we understood them. I
may not always succeed, but it is my intention and my goal as a scholar and a
writer to provide a consistent defense of intellectual freedom and to promote
the ideal of free exchange of ideas.

All
this is to say that I instinctively reject the idea of broad brush boycotts for
scholars, policy organizations and journalists. I don’t like ‘appropriate
speech’ codes in universities; I oppose laws punishing people for Holocaust
denial; I am one of those people who believe that free speech and the free
exchange of ideas are important even when people disagree with me profoundly.

Given
all this, it can hardly be surprising that I think the pontificators and
poseurs of the ASA should go soak their heads after such a foolish vote. But
despite my visceral dislike for what I can’t help but see as a fundamental
betrayal of the basic ideals of the intellectual life, I do think that some
critics of the resolution are being too tough on the poor ASA.

The core
of the criticism (other than the point that intellectual blockades and boycotts
are inherently wrong) is that since the ASA has singled out Israel for special
treatment even though there are many worse human rights violators in the world
demonstrates that the ASA is a nest of ugly anti-Semites.

This
criticism is partly true. Even by the strictest measures, Israel is by no means
the worst human rights violator on this sad planet of ours and the
Palestinians, despite their entirely legitimate complaints, are not the worst
treated people alive. Muslims in Burma, many Tibetans, just about everyone in
North Korea, and the hundreds of millions of enslaved bonded workers in the
Indian subcontinent all endure greater injustices and deprivation in their
daily lives than the mass of the Palestinian people. Yet Israel clearly gets a
disproportionate weight of global disapproval for what it does. We’ve frequently
noted on this blog that even when it comes to the suffering of the
Palestinians, there’s a tendency to focus one-sidedly Israeli actions and to
minimize the injustices Palestinians experience at the hands of Arabs from the
Gulf to Egypt (which keeps its borders with Gaza firmly closed), not to mention
the systemic and ugly discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon.

So the
ASA, like a lot of other hotheads around the world, comes down like a ton of
bricks on Israeli wrongdoing while turning a blind eye to other, worse
misdeeds. Anti-Semitism, pure and simple, say some.

It
isn’t that simple and it isn’t that pure. There are, I have no doubt,
anti-Semites both conscious and unconscious in the ASA, and their dark hearts
rejoiced when this boycott was proclaimed. I have no way of estimating their
numbers; anti-Semitism is a sickness of the soul and like racism, it is
embedded in the cultural structures of our society in ways that can sometimes
be hard for people to recognize or understand. There are all kinds of people
who claim to be free of all prejudice but who are convinced that “the Jews”
control the media, control the banks, control American politics or whatever.
Just like people can be warped by racist cultural assumptions and stereotypes
without being consciously aware of being prejudiced or even consciously wishing
in any way to be associated with the evils of racism, people can be
unconsciously shaped by the way our cultural surround has been warped through
centuries and even millennia.

But
anti-Semites, knowing or unknowing, are just part of the picture. Besides
actual anti-Semitism—of which, again, there is still quite a bit—there are four
other sources of support for these unbalanced resolutions.

The
first group that gets madder at Israel than at other countries with worse human
rights records is left-leaning American Jews. This is complicated. It’s natural
and even commendable to hold friends and kinfolk to a higher than normal
standard, and because Judaism historically has insisted on high ethical
standards in human conduct, it’s easy to see how some Jews who disagree with
Israeli policies would feel compelled to take a strong and public stand. For
many of these Jews, criticizing Israeli policies and even voting for
resolutions like the ASA loser isn’t being self-hating or anti-Jewish or even
anti-Zionist. It is about standing up for what they see as the true and
necessary idealism of the Jewish people and upholding the honor of Jewish
values. These people also often believe that in taking these stands they aren’t
supporting anti-Semitism—they think they are fighting it by showing the world
that not all Jews support the crimes of Israel, and perhaps by showing their
fellow scholars in left leaning academic enclaves that not all Jews should be
tarred with the Likud brush.

A
second group of supporters for these ASA style resolutions is made up of people
(usually westerners) who don’t really understand the historical roots and
cultural realities of Israel. This group (and American Jews are often among
them) sees Israel essentially as a western country that should know better than
to do the kinds of reprehensible things a country like the Netherlands would
never do. Because Jews have played such a significant role in the development
of freedom and the open society in the western world, many westerners see
Israel as a western transplant in the Middle East. And because they see
Israel’s existence as a consequence of (or reparation for) the Holocaust in Europe,
they think the Jewish state is basically a nation of ethnic and cultural
Europeans.

This
is, of course, sheer ignorance. Israel’s population today is not an offshoot of
the west. Demographically, Israel is a Middle Eastern country today; millions
of Jewish refugees from Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and from all
over the Maghreb now make up fifty percent of Israel’s population. These
Israelis can often combine the political and cultural attitudes found in the
Arab world with the special bitterness that comes not only from exile, but from
having your sufferings ignored and even despised. (Palestinian refugees from
Israel get infinitely more sympathy and support from the international
community than Jewish refugees from Arab countries ever do.) Including the
large number of Israeli immigrants who came originally from Russia and other
countries in eastern Europe and the Balkans, a large majority of Israelis have
no roots in the western world and the ancestors of most present day Israelis
never spent a day of their lives in democratic countries until they got to the
embattled Jewish enclave in the Middle East. Seventy percent of Israel’s
population today comes from the old lands of the Ottoman Empire and Russia
rather than from Western Europe.

Israel
isn’t an underachieving Denmark; it would be more accurate to say that it is an
overachieving Turkey or a miraculously liberal and tolerant Lebanon. However,
lots of people in the west don’t know as much about Israel as they think they
do and so they are sincerely surprised and offended by Israeli actions that
they assume (perhaps condescendingly) are “normal” when developing countries do
them. Israelis themselves aren’t completely guiltless in this confusion; it has
sometimes suited the purposes of Israeli diplomacy to play up its western
roots. However, ignorance about Israel mixed with arrogance and condescension
about the perceived political immaturity of non-western societies around the
world is a leading cause of resolutions like the ASA folly.

The
third group is the Palestinians themselves. It’s not anti-Semitic for a
Palestinian to be angrier at Israeli misbehavior than, say, at Pakistan for its
appalling record of mistreating religious minorities, or China for its
treatment of the Tibetans. It’s a natural human tendency to be angrier at the
people whose actions affect you most directly than at people whose misdeeds
only affect people you don’t know.

Finally,
there’s a fourth group in the mix: people who are not Palestinians themselves
but for various reasons make a strong and emotionally charged connection
between the Palestinian cause and some issue that touches them personally. For
many non-Palestinian Arabs, the sufferings of the Palestinians are both a sign
and a cause of Arab oppression. A Tunisian or a Libyan may not have any
personal experience of Israeli wrongdoing, and may have lived under an Arab
government that actually oppressed all of its citizens in ways Israel could
never emulate, but the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East can still
feel like a deep personal and national affront.

Beyond
the Arabs, many Muslims also see the rise of a Jewish state (again, often
wrongly seen more as a west European implant than as the demographic mix that
it is) as both the consequence and a sign of western arrogance and disdain for
Muslims and their history and values.

And
beyond the Muslim world, there are many people who see the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict as one more episode in the western world’s conquest and domination of
non-western peoples. Zionism is seen as a form of colonialism, and the Jewish
settlers in the Middle East are seen as the latest incarnation of the French
settlers in Algeria, the white settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa, and so
on. Some of these are people who come out of countries with histories
profoundly shaped by ugly colonial experiences, some are westerners trying to
cope with the difficult legacy of colonial history. But to the degree that the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to serve as a symbolic stand-in for
colonialism and resistance to it, across the developing world and on trendy
western campuses, there’s a sincerely felt if often poorly reasoned sense that
to pass anti-Israel resolutions today is like passing anti-apartheid
resolutions a generation ago.

It
would be wrong to confound all these very different points of view with
anti-Semitism, but it would also be wrong to say that anti-Semitism doesn’t
sometimes mix in with these other points of view. The human heart is crooked
above all things, and disentangling all the various strands that go into a
particular person’s actions at any given time is a task best left to Almighty
God.

What
goes on in a leftist hothouse like the ASA is a kind of witches’ brew of these
various forms of anger: often unconscious anti-Semitism expressing itself as
disproportionate anger at Israel; feelings of anger and the need of American
Jews to take what they see as an important moral stand against Israeli
behavior; the efforts of pro-Palestinian activists, often operating as part of
an organized campaign, to score points; and a healthy dose of arrogant
ignorance mixed with anti-colonialism of various degrees of seriousness and
sincerity.

Other
than the anti-Semitism it’s all very understandable, but a professional body
that lets itself be dominated by these kinds of concerns doesn’t do itself much
good. Sometimes the critics of these sanctions efforts go too far themselves,
and dismiss the whole complicated mess as a simple episode of anti-Semitism run
amuck. What’s happening is much more complicated, but the more I look at the
half-baked anti-Israel resolutions the trendy left keeps proposing, the more
confident I am that academic country boycotts and campus speech restrictions are
two excellent examples of things this world can do without.Comment by Shahar Luft:“But to
the degree that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to serve as a
symbolic stand-in for colonialism and resistance to it, across the developing
world and on trendy western campuses, there’s a sincerely felt if often poorly reasoned
sense that to pass anti-Israel resolutions today is like passing anti-apartheid
resolutions a generation ago.”

That’s
probably the core, if there is any. But is that not antisemitism? When Israelis
are compared to European settlers in Africa, the subtext is really “you don't
belong here,” which is exactly what Arabs tell us in private conversation when
they’re sincere. After all, some African dictatorships were a lot worse in
objective terms than the old SA, but still it attracted more odium because it
was perceived in some way as not belonging,

However,
Jews heard this “you don’t belong” not only from Palestinian Arabs. They heard
it throughout their history from more or less everyone. Our history is not one
of imperial expansion. It’s one of subservience and persecution, and the
constant allegation that we are strangers; that we do not relate organically
and authentically to the environment, do not work on the land, are not attuned
to the natural rhythm of the host countries, that our tongues do not easily
roll their languages, that we follow alien gods that rule a different heaven
than the one visible from the meadows of the Ukraine or the casba of Baghdad.

So
where the political narcissists see a guerilla fighter, we see a Cossack. Where
they see Nelson Mandela, we see Adolph Hitler. They think they’re liberators,
we think that they are – essentially – bigots who repeat every slander and lie
that was hauled at us.

The Arab Crisis. By Martin Kramer. Sandbox, December 17, 2013.Kramer:This is
an extraordinary time in the Middle East, but just what we have witnessed has
eluded consensus. That is reflected in the terminology. Some called it the
“Arab Spring,” by analogy to the democratic transformations in Europe. When it
became clear that the path wasn’t going to be as smooth as in Europe, others
backtracked and called it the “Arab Awakening,” which sounds like a longer-term
proposition. Still others, who saw Islamists initially triumph in elections,
took to calling it the “Islamist Winter.” The terminological confusion is a
reflection of analytical disagreement.

Another
source of confusion has been the widespread resort to historical analogies.
When it didn’t look like the transition would be that smooth, or might even be
aborted, commentary began to appear comparing the events to Europe in 1848.
When optimists wanted to make the point that sometimes successful revolutions
take a long time, they pointed to the American revolution of 1776. When
pessimists wanted to emphasize that revolutions conceived in idealism could go
astray, they pointed to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Finally, some circled
back to 1989, but this time not with an emphasis on the “Spring” analogy to
Poland, but on the “Balkan Ghosts” analogy to Bosnia. Analogies are a crutch,
to which we return when our analysis is thin.

As a
historian by training, I have no difficulty predicting that the debate over
terminology and the application of analogies will go on for many years to come.
If historians still debate the causes of the French Revolution, there is no
reason to think the events of the past couple of years won’t be debated far
into the future. That’s how we historians make our living.

But you
don’t make your living that way. You do analysis of the moment, and you have to
make a judgment call based on what evidence there is now, in order to predict
the future trajectory on which to base policy and strategy. So while it would
suit me just fine to say that it’s too early to tell, let me go out on a limb
and make some generalizations.

Let us
agree that what we are witnessing is a very profound crisis. Regimes have
fallen, tens of thousands have died, millions are refugees. There is even a
nominal price tag. The banking giant HSBC has just released a report estimating
that this crisis will have cost Middle Eastern countries $800 billion in lost output
by the end of next year. It also estimates that the combined GDP of the seven
most-impacted countries—Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and
Bahrain—will be 35% lower by the end of 2014 than it would have been if the
2011 uprisings hadn’t happened.

This is
wealth destruction on a massive scale. And it is not as if these economies had
a big buffer to absorb this hit: the already-poor have become desperately poor.
As against these mounting costs, the gains have been debatable. Has there been
progress toward good governance and the rule of law? Or descent into rule by
militias and pervasive insecurity? The situation differs from country to
country, but overall, it is hard to be optimistic about any of the impacted
countries, which are mired in various degrees of turmoil.

But
before we can say what sort of crisis this is, let’s say what sort of crisis it
isn’t. It isn’t just a repudiation of authoritarian rule. It is true that the
kind of rule based on personality cult and pervasive fear has lost its grip.
The United States contributed to that by removing Saddam Hussein from power in
2003. Saddam was the avatar for a certain kind of regime, and his fall exposed
others who ruled in the same way. His removal dissipated the aura of fear that
surrounded such regimes, because the praetorian guards entrusted with their
defense could be put to flight. The enablers of these regimes were prepared to
torture to defend them. What they weren’t prepared to do was to fight and die.
That proved to be the case from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya.

But if
it was a revulsion against authoritarian rule, and a yearning for the dignity
conferred by democracy, how does one explain the support of Egyptians for a
Muslim Brotherhood regime which was itself authoritarian? Or the counter-revolution
in Egypt, which returned a military junta to power by coup? Perhaps this isn’t
a political crisis of authoritarianism versus democracy, between bad
(authoritarian) guys and good (democratic) guys. In the case of Egypt, there
isn’t even an agreement over who the bad guys and good guys are. And there
isn’t a consensus over Syria either, where only a handful of the players are
committed to democracy in a form we would recognize.

If it
wasn’t about freedom and democracy, was it a “return to Islam”? It briefly did
look just like that. For a moment, it seemed like another analogy, Iran 1979,
might be apt. Certainly the status quo has been eroded by the spread of an
Islamist social movement among the masses. But Islamists didn’t lead the
uprisings, and they haven’t been able to consolidate their early victories in
elections and secure positions of dominance. Islamists have struggled without
success to translate their social base into coherent and effective politics.
Perhaps this is because people aren’t persuaded they have the answer to the
crisis, or even understand it.

Was it
an economic crisis? Many of you are no doubt familiar with what I might call,
for lack of a better term, deep explanations for the revolutions. One of them,
backed up by many statistics, is the demographic youth bulge which has surged
through the Arab world. This part of the world is in a transition to lower
rates of fertility, but it is now paying the price of extraordinarily high
fertility rates registered twenty to thirty years ago. Millions of young people
have flooded the labor markets, and no economy in the world could keep up. The
turmoil is sometimes interpreted as the outburst of frustrated young men
venting their rage at their own indolence and impotence.

But if
this were primarily an economic crisis, why did it erupt at a time of economic
expansion and growth? And why wasn’t it anticipated that the resulting
instability would actually worsen the economic plight of these countries?

Having
now exhausted various explanations, and found them wanting, I proceed to my
sweeping generalization. This is a crisis of culture. That is to say, it is
more than a political or social or economic crisis. Of course it has elements
of all of these things, but at its most fundamental, it is a crisis of
culture—to be precise, the implosion of the hybrid civilization that dominated
the twentieth century in the Arab world.

That
hybrid was the defensive, selective adaptation of Islamic traditions to the
ways of the West. The idea was that the tradition could be preserved, that its
essence could be defended, while making adjustments to modernity as needed. The
timeless character of the political, religious, and social traditions of the
region could be upheld, even as upgrades were made to accommodate modernity. In
Turkey, Atatürk’s cultural revolution had thrown all of tradition overboard and
embraced the ways of Europe without reservation. The Arabs resisted the notion,
and their leaders promised them a different path, a hybrid of the Arab-Islamic
tradition with Western-style modernity.

This
hybrid civilization pretended to be revolutionary, but it permitted the
survival of those pre-modern traditions that block progress, from
authoritarianism and patriarchy to sectarianism and tribalism. This hybrid
civilization has now failed, and what we have seen is a collapse, not of a
political system, but of a moral universe left behind by time.

That
failure was long concealed by a mixture of regime maneuvering and the prop of
oil. It has been cushioned in those places in the Arab Gulf where rulers have
given up on the better part of Arab-Islamic civilization, inviting the Louvre
and the Guggenheim and American universities to build branches, and allowing
expatriates to outnumber the Arabs. These are the places that have become
refuges from chaos elsewhere, and that have even profited from it. But in the
great centers of Arab-Islamic civilization, from Cairo to Damascus to Baghdad,
the crisis of the political order is primarily a symptom of the collapse of
their own hybrid of tradition and modernity.

The
failure of the hybrid is most dramatically evidenced by the rise of
sectarianism. The Sunni-Shiite divide has lots of layers, including a disparity
of power, often the legacy of colonialism. But the mindset of sectarianism is
thoroughly pre-modern. Modern nationalism was devised at least in part to blunt
sectarianism among Muslims.

But
because the tradition had to be respected, the hybrid civilization of the
region tolerated the exclusion of Jews and the marginalization of Christians.
It was only one step from there to the defamation by Shiite of Sunni, by Sunni
of Alawi, and on and on. The jihad of Muslim against Muslim, whether waged by
Lebanon’s Hezbollah in Syria, or by extreme Islamists in parts of Iraq and
northern Syria, is a huge reversal. It is like a page taken straight out of
eighth- or ninth-century Islamic history. Here we are in a Middle East where
the major divide isn’t over the form of government, or the nature of the
economic system, or the extent of individual liberty. It is over a dispute
dating from the seventh century of Islam—the sort of thing Europe left behind
when it secularized during the Enlightenment.

There
are some who would actually reify this by inscribing it on the map. There is a
certain line of reasoning, that what the Middle East really needs is a new map,
drawn along sectarian lines. This is how the argument goes: The 1916
Sykes-Picot map is worn out, it is coming apart at the seams. The lines on the
political map are losing their meaning, the lines that aren’t yet on the map
are becoming realities. An alternative map is needed, and most of the
alternatives have a standard feature: divvying up the Fertile Crescent along
sectarian and ethnic lines.

There
is no doubt that the present crisis is weakening some states, and that they are
losing their ability to project central power up to their borders. Sectarian
and ethnic separatism does have purchase. But even if new lines could be drawn,
how would this solve the crisis? How would it make the region better suited to
embrace modernity? The fact is that sectarian statelets, predicated on
pre-modern identities, could well go the other way. Think about the Sunni
Islamist quasi-states centered around Raqqa in northern Syria and Gaza on the
Mediterranean. These aren’t going to become the next Dubai or Qatar, and not
just because they don’t have oil. If the map does come undone, and new
statelets or quasi-states or mini-states are born, that is just as likely to
bring about more sectarian and ethnic conflict than ease it.

In
summation, there are millions of people who now must reconfigure the way they
see themselves and the world, not just through a political revolution, but
through a cultural one. There is no way any outside power outside can
deliberately accelerate or channel this transformation. And since we are much closer
to the beginning of that process than the end, the region will remain a
cauldron for years if not decades to come.